Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

October 31, 2006

My usual column has been published in Ariadne (Issue 49) and is entitled 'Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?'. It's a fairly critical piece on Google (and most of my pieces on Google seem to be critical nowadays) and it's looking at what they're doing and the competition they're up against.

Ariadne is as usual full of good things, and the article 'Wiki or Won't He?' was excellent and worth reading for an overview of the subject, and the specifics of public sector wikis.

October 28, 2006

Link: Guide To Custom Search Engines (CSEs). A directory of Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs), created by site
owners & Google, offering search results different than Google's
standard search. Use the custom searches here or copy them to your own
web site (as permitted).

October 27, 2006

Link: Google Librarian Center and Newsletter Survey. Oh those people over at Google crack me up every time. Apparently 'Google is listening', which will be a first. Anyway, they've created a survey, as you can tell from the link. It's very US centric, but then what else can we expect, given that the Center hasn't, and doesn't appear to know that anywhere else exists.

What I found interesting with a survey where 'Google is listening' is that there weren't very many opportunities to actually tell them what we think - it was then asking the questions without much opportunity to interact. I offered them my email details and said that I'd be interested in talking to them, and I doubt I'll hear anything else, but if I do, I'll be sure and mention it.

In common with lots of other internet observers I'm always talking about the new stuff that comes out, and how it's going to make a difference to what we do on a daily basis, and how it's the best thing since whenever. And that's usually all that you hear. So I thought that, for once, I'd talk about a few of the things that I've stopped using and why.

NowPublic. I wrote about that a while ago. You could use it to create blog entries, have other people add to them and so on and such like. Great except for 2 things. Firstly, while it would add to my TypePad blog without any problem at all I couldn't assign categories, which meant that I had to go back in and do it by hand. Secondly it created 2 entries for some reason, which meant that I had to also delete one. Sorry - life just isn't long enough for that amount of annoyance. Status: Gone!

claimID is a resource that you could use to track, classify, annotate, pritize and lord alone knows what with your identity. My understanding (which could be wrong of course) was that it was supposed to get a nice high ranking with search engines so that if anyone did a search for me, this would pop up and I could use it to provide lots of useful information about me. Well, I looked thru the first 50 results in Google, and couldn't find any claimID links. Waste of my time. Status: Gone!

Squidoo is the real surprise here. I do have a bunch of lenses over there on a variety of different things, and it's really easy to add to them. I'd have liked to see a really easy link checker to see if stuff was still up and running, but that's trivial - I can get that anywhere. I wasn't fussed about making money (which is a good job because I think I've made less than a dollar so far), so that's not the problem. The Squidoo people are great at keeping me informed about stuff, so that's not it either. I think, when all is said and done, Squidoo is... boring. That's a dreadful admission to make, but it's just not fun. I look at things like Google gadgets, widgets and bunches of stuff like that, and Squidoo just looks really tame by comparision. I'll continue to use the lenses, because they are useful, but it's really not quite what I was hoping it would be. Status: not quite gone, but on the back boiler.

LinkedIn is one of those early 6 degrees of separation things, and you could in theory use it to make business contacts with people. The trouble is, I have this collection of people that I'm linked to - I don't have the first damn idea who most of them are! You get an invite from someone who sneezed over you 6 months ago in a queue for the loo at a conference and it's kinda rude not to add them isn't it? And there's a bunch of people I'm connected to by other people that I've never heard of either - the whole thing is a mess. And has it ever been useful? No. Will it ever be useful? I really doubt it. I've got stuff up there, but I can't be bothered to do anything with it. Status: Gathering dust.

(Hey... this is really good fun folks - it's like a spring clean. Try it for yourself - take 5 minutes to look at the junk, especially the stuff cluttering your toolbar, and get rid of it!)

Blinklist is another thing that I tried. Delicious kinda took over however. Nothing wrong with it, just... bleugh. How many of these things can a fellow use at once? Status: Lost out to Delicious.

Vox is a blogging resource and I've written exactly one post to it. I haven't added any more because I don't have the time. They haven't given me a quick post option as far as I can see. I have one for Typepad, but not for this. I'm sorry, but I'm not about to faff around logging in to post something - I want to do it there and then from wherever I am. What a minor error they've made, but how important! They've missed one of the absolute basics... I want my time saved, not wasted. And they're wasting it. Status: Forgotten.

RIght, that'll do for now. It was great fun as well - try it yourself! What things have you given up using and why? Leave a comment...

C|Net has reviewed some RSS readers in the article: Make your own headlines - Internet. The ones they looked at were Bloglines (7.7/10), Rojo (6.7), Google Reader (not rated), FeedDemon 2 (8), Newsgator (7.5). Given that FeedDemon costs money, Bloglines still looks like the best bet.

Link: Official Google Blog: Do you "Google?". Jeez, when is this ever going to end? More from Google about how we can use the term, together with examples. This time they're talking about 'Google' in relation to other search engines. So we can apparently use "I googled him on the well-know website Google.com" but not "I googled him on Yahoo".

To be honest, do we really care? No, not really. Yes, I can see Big G's point, but I have to wonder at the extent it's worth all this - it just makes them look a bit silly really. Besides, haven't we already had this discussion back in August?

I'm tempted to ask the Google lawyers if it's correct use to say 'Shove it up your Google', but they'd probably get cross with me.

The number of people who don't want net access is rising in the UK -
it's currently at 44% (11.2 million) UK households, according to the BBC NEWS Digital divide could be deepening article. More than 70% of that group have little or no intention of getting net access. There are 3 main reasons cited for staying off the net - lack of interest/need, cost, lack of skills. Even if these barriers were removed 42.8% of people asked refused to say if they'd get access.